A Painted Kind of Melody
by DesiredNoodle
Summary: Isaac Mendez, growing up, realizes that he can dream the future and capture it on canvas. Splattered remnants of his life in rustic colors, a pastel of disoriented adolescence. Niki, lost, stumbles; and he doesn't know who she is, but he will save her.


**A/N**: Please note that I don't own any of these characters, NBC and Tim Kring do, blahblahblah…you get the point, I hope. I'm just posting this here 'cause I'm bored and I'm keen to see some interest in this story. For now, it sits rusting in my stories file, with a diligent (and sometimes stir-crazy) creator as its only companion. Well? Does it command an audience? We shall see. _;

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Sometimes destiny chooses a person; sometimes a person chooses a destiny. We, as an embodiment of humanity, revel in mystery and want to confuse reality for something more. Questions often linger on the forefront of our minds. Are we alone in the universe? Can immorality be cured? Is there a fountain of youth? Answers that we seek have become the bane of our existence. We immerse ourselves in study and become infatuated with the mundane, and yet it's like running a mile and losing a step of genuine curiosity. Our hearts and our minds are too vast and complicated to understand. The scientific explanation is always there, but what about the unexplainable? Can science really tell us if there is life, like ours, in another universe? Can science authentically tear apart the reason why a child will have a bond with its mother more so than its father? Or why spiders eat their young – not because they want to, but because they have no choice?

Are heroes born, or made?

The simple truth is that a person makes their own answers, and despite the lack of a scientist's point of view, we cannot escape the path that we have written for ourselves. The war of choices has raged within us for decades. The last question, my friends, is this: can evolution be changed?

Chapter One: Isaac Mendez

14 years old

August 10th

I woke up dead.

How can somebody wake up if they're dead? I was breathing. I could move. I could think – but I was dead.

My hand shot up into the vacant air, and I clenched it into a fist, grabbing nothing. In the dream, if it could be called that, we were standing on top of a decrepit building, looking down at all the tiny insects beneath the dirty soles of our feet. A miniscule shred of debris slid from beneath us and tumbled like Humpty Dumpty downdowndown until it disappeared into the sea of people. Somebody looked up. We could see them clearly, despite the monumental distance, see their facial expressions turn from nonchalant to shocked. We could see the woman reach into her purse and withdraw a cell-phone. We could see the crimson paint chipped off on her ring finger, and the hairs standing on end up and down her arms.

We should not be able to see all this but subsequent to waking up I realized that it was just a dream. I could do anything I wanted to - except it really wasn't me, because I definitely did not wear stilettos.

When we jumped, we could feel the wind rustling through our long straw-colored hair, and the last thing we saw were the tiny grains of sand stuck between the cracks of the sidewalk. We splattered four ways. The only sound dominating the moment was the repelling crunch of broken bones, and when I awoke I was reaching for the locket I glimpsed in somebody else's – no, _my_ - imagined memory. My hands clasped onto nothingness, and all dream-thoughts abandoned me in a wreath of white-hot mystification.

At first, it came back to me in wisps of images; a shattered skull, a black dress with floral embellishment, the tag sticking out in a woman's sweater way down below. All the insignificant things seemed to pop out, as if my subconscious wasted an emphasis on the wrong designs – I could recall the sand and the sign five miles away reading "Welcome to this world famous wine growing region…and the wine is bottled poetry". Fireflies cluttered it in desperation.

I finally pried this anonymous woman and me apart, placing her in her own individual psyche and remaining obscure in my own. A man's face was upturned between the space of her feet, watching her, as if he knew her intentions and her memories - as if he knew her before all this, the Delacour gang and the identity thieves (before her mother turned her into the Others and left her to the dull throb of insanity). I could somehow relate to this woman, detached, like reading a book and falling in love with the main character, completely admonished when they fall, utterly joyful when they succeed. I breathed her in like second-hand smoke that eventually made me light-headed, woozy. I wallowed in her mistakes from a distance.

The summer dawn spilled dappled secrets through the drawn curtains, creating geometrical light throughout the breadth of green carpet. The smell of sausage and pancakes drifted throughout my room, but I was in no mood to sit up at the moment. The walls seemed to be closing in, pumping dead air through the cracks of the sleep world and the real world, creating a line of delusion. I looked down at my small satin dress, looked over at my bare shoulders, pale even in the scintillating sunlight. I analyzed the dark freckle just on the edge of my shoulder, hanging on for dear life, and the freckles that preceded it. That wasn't right. My shoulders were far from pale, be speckled, and marked with feminine grooves; they were broad, lanky, awkward, hanging like decorative appendages.

Blinking, and re-blinking, and re-re-blinking, making sure to bat all the junk away from the tangent room around me, with all its glorious contents (including me), I made sure to dot every maneuver with lethargy. I kept repeating _I am not a woman_ while I performed routinely duties, until it was that morning's motto.

My mother's cooking was nothing short of amazing, the scents tasting like childhood with Papa and Mimi (before their tragic deaths), drinking tapped eggnog on the picnic table, Johnny Cash wafting from the open front door.

The kitchen had been painted yellow over pink, and where the yellow peeled, there was pink. She had the radio turned down low, George Strait, while she spatula'd the eggs onto two plastic plates, one for each of us. Bacon and ham had already been laid out, crispy on the ends, only a little bit burnt in the middle. Just right. There was toast and homemade jam, too.

She hadn't acknowledged my presence, singing along with Strait and occasionally missing a beat. She had a great voice, though; if nobody knew any better, it could've been a duet. Ismene Mendez only sung like this when nobody was listening, nurturing a phobia for all things that could go embarrassingly wrong. I watched her tuck her pastel-brown hair behind her ear and interject the singing with a prolonged sigh, stopping long enough to turn the stove off and clear the dishes. Alas, I cleared my throat and moseyed my way to the refrigerator, searching the interior like a stray dog sniffing for scraps. No milk. Again. I matched her sigh with my own, for a reason entirely deviant from hers; mine was parsimonious, lacking the inflection of sadness, but rather irritation.

"Ma, need two dollars for milk. Can't have breakfast without it, y'know."

I stole a glance in her direction, and she was staring at me with those guilty eyes, soulful chocolate; almost pleading, as if it were my fault we were out of milk.

"_Que queres_, Isaac? Dinero? We don't have any! Two dollars? I give you two dollars yesterday, for lunch. Why? You spend it on those _libros_!" She inhaled, exhaled, deep – the way she does when she's absurdly upset, her bosom inflated like a bird fending for its territory. Then, as if the petty argument had melted away like burning plastic, she scooped the plates up and set them in their designated spots, one on each end of the table. Moving her skirt to one side, she sat, poking the food with a fork and basking in the silence between George Strait's verses.

Her words had struck a disheartening chord somewhere in my chest, and I rummaged the cabinets for two glasses to fill with faucet-water. She looked incredibly thirsty. My mother, the statuesque goddess that could make an oasis out of her eyes, her hair; beautiful and unrelenting. I smashed a decent-sized roach with the underside of my glass as it scuttled across the table, and she watched her food with disgust. Ah, people would call me a moment-killer, but maybe I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I had still been asleep upstairs (twisting_writhing_falling in a dream), she would've passed her morning by with no regret, no problemo. I was like an ugly pimple in her life, utterly dependent and a needy little fuck. She could just pop it and let it recede, but instead she cleaned it daily, let it grow.

And now I was silently comparing myself to a pimple, leaving no food behind on my plate (devouring it with no mercy). She hadn't even touched her eggs.

Charlie Daniels enhanced the mood a bit with his cheerful melody. I wished I harbored that talent, providing a sort of catharsis to people like my mother, internally submerged with drowning priorities. The only talent I presumably obtained was my dreams of strangers gliding like vagabond embers over a blood-splotched horizon. If you could call that a talent at all. Ma ran the dishwater and turned the music up, nodding her head to the tempo. I solemnly excused myself from the table and headed upstairs to my bedroom, where I fished the comics out and traced the heroes with the strums of my mind, desperately calling out to them in an adolescent haze to save me from this musty place and set me down somewhere that didn't smell like burnt rubber tires.

Somewhere I could paint my plague into a masterpiece.


End file.
